Marion Bartoli sidesteps BBC announcer’s daft remark

A glance at the list of men’s singles champions at Wimbledon the last dozen years reveals plenty of pleasant-enough looking chaps, though not a single slam-dunk male model in the bunch.
No matter. Each one was instantly fawned over the moment he held the trophy aloft, celebrated for toughness, smarts and the kind of devotion that knows no quit.

Marion Bartoli displayed all of those qualities -- and more -- on the way to winning Wimbledon in this most tumultuous of years. But because she’s a woman, at least one man behind a microphone couldn’t stop there. His name is John Inverdale, and even as Bartoli headed toward the spectator’s box where the father who taught her to play tennis was sitting, Inverdale’s listeners on BBC Radio were treated to some musings about how she came to possess a champion’s ability.

Inverdale has apologized, of course, though that hardly came off better than his original remark. 
It’s kicked up a row in print, on the airwaves and across social media in Britain similar to the one that buzzed briefly in the United States when commentator Brent Musburger awkwardly rambled on about an Alabama University quarterback’s girlfriend during the broadcast of the college football national championship in January.

For her part, Bartoli showed up for the champion’s dinner looking like a model, ‘her dark hair down in a loose wave, figure-hugging black dress, sky-high ankle boots,’ as one British newspaper breathlessly reported- and then said, ‘I invite this journalist to come and see me this evening in ball gown and heels, and in my opinion he could change his mind.’  When her father, Dr. Walther Bartoli, was asked about Inverdale’s comments, he simply said, ‘I am not angry. She is my beautiful daughter. The relationship between Marion and me has always been unbelievable, so I don’t know what this reporter is talking about.’   Neither did Inverdale at the time -- and that’s the real shame in this mess.